Blessed by the Potato

Greetings loyal readers. I want to give you fair warning that this post will contain what is for many people too much information.

You’ve been warned.

Seriously now, I’m going to talk about my pee in a bit, so skip this post if that bothers you…

Ok, so I was at my parents’ for the day, and my dad is still recovering from chemo, so there are a ton of mega vitamins around. A bottle for a multi-B vitamin, some giant vitamin C pills, some vitamin E & D tablets, as well as some echinacea and other herbal junk… the only one missing was A, I think. I usually take a multivitamin at home (Flintstone’s :) since I don’t eat properly at all, but don’t actually seem to need much excess vitamins (I think my system really aggressively absorbs anything I put in it), but my parents only had these crazy grown-up ones. So, I took an individual C, D, and E vitamin, each of which was easily twice the size of my combined multivitamin.

Then, I got a sugar craving, and there wasn’t much sweet in the house. I had to get lunch and money too, so with 3 trips I could justify taking the car (rather than walking, don’t know why I was feeling so lazy, the weather was gorgeous) and got cash, a sub, and stopped at the pharmacy for some snacks. What I really wanted was a pack of Runts, but they didn’t have any. Their whole candy section was depressingly low on stock. I saw some sugar-free hard candies and figured they’d be kind of close to Runts (they were hard and fruity, and that’s how sad the candy section was), and I figured they wouldn’t draw as much flak from my parents (who really want me to stick to my diet since I look like crap).

They tasted pretty good, actually — they were sweetened with a combination of Splenda (sucralose) and another artificial sweetener that I’ve forgotten. There were only 3 flavours, all sour citrus (lemon, lime, and grapefruit) but none of them were overly tart, the sour was very subtle. After I ate about half the package I started to feel really ill and bloated. The stupid things gave me terrible gas pain and I started burping like crazy — so loud once that I scared the dog! Despite all the, er… pressure relief, the bloating was actually really painful/crampy.

That wasn’t all that fun, and I remembered why it was that I distrusted all manner of bizzare, expensive replacements for sugar. Going to the washroom later (I told you there’d be pee) I noticed that my urine was a crazy shade of neon yellow: it looked pretty much just like Moutain Dew. Ever since I had my kidney stone I have to check pretty much every time I go to the washroom to make sure I’m not too dehydrated (or cloudy, or bloody, which is always fun because sometimes when I was passing the stone the pee would be bloody before it really hurt, so I’d see it and be like “oh, shit, this is going to really fucking hurt in a second” and then it would, though most often the blood was actually from the previous round of pain). So I see this and immediately start to worry that the sucralose has somehow made it out of my bloodstream through my kidney, and that no good could possibly come of that.

Turns out it was due to the other thing I ate at my parents’: the B-vitamin complex. It had way, way more vitamin B2 than my body could use in a day, and the excess is naturally expelled by the kidneys and turns your urine freaky bright yellow. Thank goodness for Google, with my history I could have hypochondriacated my way into an emergency room for that one!

PS: I hearby coin “hypochondriacated” as a verb, and you must pay me a dime every time you wish to use it.

After Finch had a huge amount of roadway washed away in a flood last year, Sheppard just had a giant sinkhole form from a broken water main and will close the road for a long time to come…

The adage is often misinterpreted. People take it (and the related Carpe Diem) to mean they should grab life by the balls and live it to the “fullest”, bugger the consequences. All too often, “fullest” is taken to mean “most fun”, all the sorts of things you wish you could be doing right now instead of work, or reading my website. The sorts of things you think you may wish you had done more of if it were indeed your last day. However, I suspect most people won’t necessarily wish they’d spent more time drunk or on a rollercoaster or out whoring around. They’d probably wish they called their mother more, or read with their kids, or went for a bike ride with their friends. I’ve thought about it, and I think that if I were lying in a hospital bed knowing it was my last day, I would ask for a laptop, and I would write. I would do my very best to take what wisdom I’ve collected in my life, and set it down for others who follow¹.

As another Earth Day passes by virtually unnoticed, I tell people not to live selfishly, bugger the consequences. As Frank Herbert said “The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.” Still, live each day as though it were your last, but don’t just go thrill-seeking.

Rather, don’t put important things off for another day that might not come. Make your mark on the world, do the meaningful things that will be your legacy.

With God above and the Potato below, I hope there is an afterlife. I pray for it (and moreover, pray that it will be pleasant). I want to watch over humanity, and hope my descendants live on through the end of time, populating the stars and mining the secrets of the universe…

…however, I doubt that there is one — or if there is, I do not think there is any return, no (meaningul) influence extended from that realm to this one. Its existence cannot be relied upon. So if you seek immortality, you must earn it here and now, in this life. After you’re gone, all that will remain are your works and your offspring. It is my religious belief that our duty — our sole duty when all is said and done — is to improve the world around us just a little bit. To fight back againt entropy; to plant trees under whose shade we do not expect to sit, and to raise our children to be better people than we ourselves are.

So, I propose a new saying: “Live each day as though it were the first in the life of your new child.”²

Most of us, not having experienced that day, don’t really know what it’s like (the closest I can come myself is the birth of my baby sister). But we can imagine it: the feelings of joy, hope, and responsibility. Which brings me to another phrase I’ve coined just now: “what would Daddy do?” Again, I’m probably a freak amongst my peer group for thinking of these sorts of issues, but I have to wonder: would I want my son³ doing the same stuff as me? Would I be able to tell him of my experiences in this life and be proud of it, and not be shamed into lies of omission? Would I ever have to face being a hipocrite, telling him not to do things I used to do all the time myself? Would I want my daughter to date a guy like me? It’s sort of like trying not to make my mother ashamed of me, but somehow it seems more important when I think about it this way around. Perhaps that has something to do with the weird little things that make my mother ashamed of me, like when I wear a hat indoors, or sleep in past noon…

Footnotes:

1. Then, I’d probably load up a game of StarCraft to try to take my mind off things.
2. And I don’t mean running around like a crazy person and screaming with labour pains.
3. No, Wayfare isn’t pregnant. I really do think of these sorts of crazy things just out of the blue.

Holy Jedi Jesus this is cool! I’m sure it’ll be on Bug’s blog soon enough (since he sent it to me in the first place), but it belongs here too. They may not have dressed the part, but the actions and effects were awesome (or at least they were more incredible than the streaming video was able to deliver).

Edit: Found a higher-res version of Ryan vs. Dorkman.

I went to see Sidekick this weekend. It’s an indie film done here in Toronto, and currently the only watchable film print is on tour around the country along with the filmmakers.

Briefly, I thought it was pretty good. Nobody’s going to win an award for acting, and the camera work looked like it was done by film students from York, but it was watchable (which is more than I can say for some big budget movies lately). The effects were of low-end TV quality, but the fact that a film on that budget has any effects at all is impressive. I wasn’t expecting it to be much more than a decent student feature, and I enjoyed it for that.

Some of the people I was with didn’t care for it though, which is a little odd. Before I get into it in more detail, let me put in a

*** SPOILER WARNING ***

There, you’ve been duly warned.

Now, the movie had what I consider to be a neat, unique story (at least, I haven’t heard the idea before): a guy is found to have super powers, and a comic book geek notices and trains him to focus and use his power effectively, hoping he’ll become a crime-fighting superhero right from the comics (taking the place of his sidekick during the training). Unfortunately, the power goes to his head, and instead he becomes a supervillain who must be stopped. I thought it was a pretty neat plot twist.

Some of the people I was with didn’t, and said it was “so predictable” or “lame”. I’ve got to wonder at that: I don’t recall seeing a story like this before (though the opposite happens in Unbreakable), so it’s not like it was a cliched ending. So was it just the fact that there was a ton of foreshadowing (sometimes rather heavy-handed) that made it so predictable? If so, then what’s wrong with foreshadowing?

Eh, I just have this to say: being able to turn your brain off is a huge advantage when watching movies. It’s really, really hard to have a movie that is 100% effective at drawing you in, so being able to suspend disbelief really helps me to enjoy movies more, and also ignoring a lot of foreshadowing makes plot twists more dramatic. It’s why I like the M. Night Shyamalan movies so much: 6th Sense’s twist caught me completely by surprise. I was ready for Unbreakable, but still found it really enjoyable (and since my brain was half-off, I didn’t see it until way after most other people did). The Village was a little easier to spot, but I liked the characters so much I didn’t care (and once again, I didn’t spot it until way after the others). And if you saw it coming sooner, then good for you, you picked up on the foreshadowing (or have a good mind for the plot). But did seeing it coming really ruin the movie for you?

It seems like sometimes people just want to be caught completely by surprise in a movie, no matter how much they try to outthink it. But I don’t think that’s a good way to go. For starters, if you were completely sideswiped then you’d think it was just a stupid plot mechanism (such as the one in Ocean’s 12 where they just simply didn’t show us anything until the revelation).

Anyhow, I’m rambling in a more incoherent way than usual. My point is that Sidekick was a Canadian movie shot on $36k, and it looks it. However, if you can get past that there’s a decent story hidden in there, and I think it was well worth my $5. If they ever get a DVD release deal, you might want to check it out.

Plus the popcorn was really good there.